


Years marching onwards

by samariumwriting



Category: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Birthday, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:35:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22145773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: People tend to have birthdays. Mikhail, however, doesn't have one.-It was Mythra who brought it up. He didn’t know how she knew that it was Milton’s birthday, but she did, and she planned something with everyone without Milton finding out. It was small and humble and rushed but it was good and Milton had such a huge smile on his face the whole time that Mikhail almost wanted to smile himself.But he didn’t have a birthday. And that was fine, because no one was going to ask him if he did. Why would they?
Relationships: Metsu | Malos & Satahiko | Mikhail, Satahiko | Mikhail & Shin | Jin
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23





	Years marching onwards

**Author's Note:**

> Look at me, back on my XC2 bullshit  
> This was originally intended for the anniversary of XC2's release, but I...didn't quite make it and then dropped this fic for a while, but I finished it off today and thought I may as well

Mikhail didn’t have a birthday, as such. Actually, he flat out just didn’t have one. Why would he? No one had cared enough, in living memory at least, to give him one. He was just a child with barely a name and definitely no worth to anyone at all. You could even say that his worth was based on the fact that no one had cared enough about him to give him much of an identity.

But he didn’t really care. Why would he need a birthday? Why would he ever have one? Birthdays were for people who...well, had people to celebrate them with. And while he had a sort of family (that he didn’t want to call a family yet) now, he didn’t have a day of birth with them. They hadn’t been there when he was born. Nothing about his relationship with them had anything to do with his birth. Just his being alive.

It was easy to dismiss the idea to himself. The others wouldn’t ask - birthdays weren’t important when you were on the road. Birthdays were barely important at all when you were fighting something so much bigger than the thought of surviving another year (he liked to think he would, but he’d seen the power of the Artifice and he didn’t think he would be living much longer if that kind of power was unleashed near him).

And then Milton had a birthday. Because Milton was just a kid, of course he had a birthday. He used to have a family, and friends, and a village who cared about him and cared about seeing the passage of time and seeing him grow up.

It was Mythra who brought it up. He didn’t know how she knew that it was Milton’s birthday, but she did, and she planned something with everyone without Milton finding out. It was small and humble and rushed but it was good and Milton had such a huge smile on his face the whole time that Mikhail almost wanted to smile himself.

But he didn’t have a birthday. And that was fine, because no one was going to ask him if he did. Why would they?

It didn’t come up for a long time. Years came and went, and Mikhail had honestly mostly lost track of how old he really was because he knew that the way he looked didn’t, and couldn’t, reflect that. He’d lost all those human things that involved the tracking of age and the tracking of birthdays long ago.

But Jin...Jin asked him about it. They’d been in each other’s company for just over two years now, the pair of them and Malos wandering around the world trying to find out exactly what had happened all those years ago and exactly what they could do about it to make it right. Somehow. Sort of (Mikhail was, as of yet, unclear on the details. When he found out what the details were, he felt so dead to the world that he didn’t even care).

“Do you have a birthday, Mikhail?” Jin asked, one day, out of the blue. Completely out of the blue, with no warning.

“No,” he said. He expected Jin to drop it; it was unusual for him to even ask a question, let alone follow up on such a simple answer.

“Did you never think about it?” he asked. Maybe he was in a chatty mood. He got like that, every so often, when the weight of Lora in his heart wasn’t too much. He’d never been particularly verbose, even before, and now Malos was the one who did most of the talking, but sometimes he had things to say.

“I did,” he admitted. “It was a long time ago.” When he was still human. The hidden meaning remained unspoken, but Jin understood. Jin always understood the things he didn’t say.

“Why did you never say anything?”

“It never came up. And I didn't have one, so it didn’t matter.” Milton had one, and Milton’s happiness had been enough for him. Mikhail really hadn’t needed anything else in his world, other than Milton smiling away and being happy and making him feel in turn like everything would be okay one day (and look at how that turned out. A body going cold and still in his arms).

Jin nodded. The topic was dropped. Mikhail didn’t have a birthday, and now he was a blade, so he probably never would.

“You know, you’re pretty odd for a blade,” Malos said. The power he had, running through his fingertips now his core was complete once more, meant he’d been making all these little observations lately about their status as blades. It was interesting information, Mikhail supposed. It gave him an insight into the world they were going to destroy.

“Well, it’s not like I really am one,” he said. He was busy fixing up bits of the Marsanes they would definitely need in the battles to come. If Malos had something to say, he could say it to the back of his head just as well as his front.

“You are in almost every other way,” Malos said, and at one point that would have filled Mikhail with a thrill. At other times, with a fear he couldn’t shake. Now, it didn’t give him any feeling at all. He already knew that. “But blades have birth dates.”

“Huh.” Blades had birthdays. Who would have guessed that?

“I spoke to Jin about it. They correspond with the date that the current form of the blade last left the core crystal. There’s another date, for the first time the crystal was ever used. You have neither of those.”

“Knowing Amalthus, my core was probably blank,” he said. Knowing what they did about Amalthus now, this was almost guaranteed. The blade who existed in his chest had been anyone other than him, perhaps, but whoever they were had been wiped from any kind of record now. “So that’s really not a surprise. If the core had a blade that had ever been summoned, perhaps.”

“Don’t you have a human birthday, though?” Malos asked.

“Everyone was born at some point, Malos,” he said. He had been born. He had a birth date. It was just completely irrelevant. He also didn’t know when it was.

“Theoretically, I could write it into the crystal,” he said with a shrug. Mikhail looked at him. Malos probably just wanted to test out the power of everything he had at his disposal now, and not just the destructive power. The endbringer indeed.

“I don’t know it,” he said with a shrug, turning his attention to a different component that needed checking after their recent escapade.

“Don’t humans tend to know their birthdays?” Oh, Malos. For all his age and all his supposed wisdom, he really wasn’t all that intelligent sometimes. Accumulated knowledge across the ages was useless if he couldn’t figure out a few simple things.

“I don’t,” he said, and caught Malos’ glance in the reflection of the metal in front of him. He’d raised an eyebrow to question his response. When had everyone started getting so curious? When did people start caring about who he was as a person? “I didn’t have a family, and that’s the people that tend to celebrate birthdays. So I don’t have a human birthday.”

“Makes sense,” he replied, and shrugged. “I thought you’d be interested to know. It was worth offering.”

“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t know if he agreed. He supposed it was interesting to know that blades had birthdays. But something like that was worthless to him, when no one would live to see another year. Wasn’t that the plan, anyway?

Maybe having a birthday would have been nice, once in his life. But he’d made it over five hundred years without one, he didn’t think it would kill him to go without one for a little longer. After all, they’d all gone far beyond celebrating being alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed, please consider leaving a comment or saying hi on twitter [@samariumwriting](https://twitter.com/samariumwriting) (esp if you also happen to like Fire Emblem!)


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